Not Just a Perk: Making the Business Case for Upskilling and Reskilling

It wasn’t long ago that business leaders recognized the value of investing in their employees as a bottom-line company benefit. It was easy to understand: If their workforce could learn new skills and deliver more value, then output, quality, and retention would improve. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, employers began to frame upskilling and reskilling as simply an employee perk—something that could be expanded or contracted, depending on the economic climate.

During the pandemic years, employers drastically added training and upskilling references in their job postings—often framed as employee perks—in an effort to attract new talent and close internal skills gaps. In fact, over the past decade, there has been a 700% increase in the use of the terms “reskilling,” “upskilling,” and “on-the-job training” in job postings, according to a review of 332 million job postings by The Burning Glass Institute and Multiverse. More than half of those references were made between 2020 and 2022. 

Now, as the labor market cools, this trend has begun to reverse itself, and more employers are pulling back on their upskilling and reskilling efforts. Unfortunately, this will ultimately hurt companies in the long term. 

As the pace of new technology accelerates and the half-life of skills gets even shorter, we need to restore the broad understanding across C-suite leaders that upskilling and reskilling are critical tools for company performance—not a perk that can be added and dropped at will. 

A Win for Workers and Employers

Artificial intelligence is drastically changing all parts of work. The majority of business leaders responding to a Multiverse survey see a tremendous upside in adopting AI, but half of them believe that a lack of AI skills “will negatively impact revenue growth, productivity, and profitability” for their company.

Data from Deloitte suggests that companies with a strong learning culture experience 52% higher productivity. Across all our Multiverse clients and programs, the employees who have been through skilling programs in areas such as data science, software development, and analytics have led to $2.5 billion in cost savings and revenue-generating activities for their companies. 

Many employers understand this opportunity and have invested appropriately. Verizon, for example, has created programs that allow employees to upskill in their current roles or reskill into new ones. The result is increased productivity and an employee retention rate that’s three times the U.S. average. Elsewhere, Mastercard’s upskilling program helped improve the retention of experienced employees. And when Yum! Brands reskilled its restaurant workers, it found new sources of talent for its corporate operations, buffering the consistent labor shortages. 

The Skills Gap: Diagnose, Prescribe, and Treat

When speaking to business leaders, I have learned that their lack of investment in reskilling isn’t because they don’t recognize its importance, but rather because they’re unable to discuss skilling metrics in a way that stakeholders understand and respect. 

Business leaders would welcome reskilling and upskilling if they could do so effectively and with enough confidence that it would produce a clear return on investment. We need to make learning consequential, but current systems aren’t refined enough for that ask. 

Corporate learning programs and learning management systems have been part of the problem: Buying a content library for your employees is the equivalent of getting them all library cards and then saying you’ve educated them. 

However, there is an approach nearly every business can start taking right away. My advice is to run a three-stage process: diagnose, prescribe, and treat. 

• Diagnose: By starting with an in-depth diagnosis of the gap between the goals of the company and the capability of its people, you can then quantify the skills gap. 
• Prescribe: From there, you can prescribe learning pathways that are designed to address that gap across the workforce. 
• Treat: Next, you can treat the problem in a manner that adapts to both company context and individual needs, often supplemented by AI.

Finally, to really assess the value and success, you should return to the original problem statement and measure progress to ensure you are, in fact, solving what you set out to solve.

Enacting the “diagnose, prescribe, and treat” method adds tangible value to businesses’ bottom lines by increasing speed, lowering costs, and improving reliability.

A Program, Not a Perk

By changing how businesses approach worker learning and adopting new processes, we could finally experience a sea change in the global economy. While 87% of business leaders believe they have skills gaps, nearly half of workers have had no training in the last five years. This contrast is at the heart of the skills dilemma and the war for talent.

If more businesses invested in building new skills for their workforce through upskilling and reskilling programs—including leveraging new technologies—they could see untold returns and gain a competitive edge over organizations that continue to dangle worker training as merely a perk.  

Euan Blair is the founder and CEO of Multiverse, a tech company that identifies, closes, and prevents skills gaps through personalized, on-the-job learning.